Soft-on-crime North Carolina Democrat Senate candidate Roy Cooper jetted off to New York City as Hurricane Helene gathered strength and prepared to make landfall — and he was supposed to be leading preparedness efforts. Cooper, the two-term governor of the state, was aware that the deadly storm was going to cause “disastrous” flooding in Western North Carolina yet left the state without notifying the sitting lieutenant governor of his plans.
Cooper was a featured speaker at the September 25, 2024, New York Times Climate Forward event to discuss “his state’s embrace of clean energy” and support for Green New Deal policies.
He predicted at the event that Kamala Harris would win North Carolina, citing the state’s “college-educated people,” and said he sensed the same excitement as Barack Obama’s narrow win in 2008. (Harris would lose to President Donald Trump by more than 183,000 votes, the largest margin of his three victories in the Tar Heel State.)
Cooper backed Biden administration policies embracing the radical climate agenda and backed the so-called Inflation Reduction Act and American Rescue Plan, which pushed inflation to 40-year highs. He also said he would continue to support “clean energy jobs” such as the failed VinFast deal, where Cooper committed $1 billion of taxpayer money to a Vietnamese-based electric vehicle (EV) manufacturer.
“We know that climate change is an existential threat to our planet and to our people, but we also know that the move to clean energy is providing a significant economic boost that’s putting money in the pockets of American families,” Cooper said at the event.
While trashing “denialist” Republicans in New York City, Cooper ignored the gathering strength of Helene when the storm was just hours away from making landfall in Florida and Georgia.
A day earlier, on September 24, The Associated Press reported that then-Tropical Storm Helene “could strengthen into a major hurricane while moving north toward the U.S.”
The AP wrote in part:
In the U.S., federal authorities are positioning generators, food and water, along with search-and-rescue and power restoration teams, as President Joe Biden declared an emergency in Florida. Gov. Ron DeSantis also declared a state of emergency for most of the state’s counties, 10 of which were urging or ordering evacuations.
The storm is anticipated to be unusually large and fast-moving, meaning storm surge, wind and rain will likely extend far from the storm’s center, the hurricane center said. Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp has declared a state of emergency.
On September 25, the day Cooper left the state and went to New York City, his office issued a state of emergency but did not brief the public. Cooper did hold briefings in Raleigh on subsequent days.
Hurricane Helene’s punishing winds and rain hit Western North Carolina in the early morning hours of September 27. the National Oceanic and Aeronautical Administration (NOAA) in an after-action report said Hurricane Helene was “the most devastating natural disaster in western North Carolina’s history” in which affected areas received as much as 30 inches of rainfall, felt sustained tropical storm force winds, and suffered 107 deaths.
In the storm’s aftermath, Cooper’s office could not even put a number on the death toll for weeks on end. One resident quoted in an Axios story said, “It’s frustration that these numbers are inaccurate, and [you can’t] tell us that they are [accurate]. And frustration that we’re also 22 days without water. And then the third part of it is … feeling like we’ve been forgotten, and most people [outside of the area] don’t really understand the extent.”
A March 2025 Washington Post story aimed at criticizing President Trump’s takeover of the federal recovery further exposed Cooper’s failures at storm preparedness and recovery.
Cooper never appointed a “disaster recovery coordinator” to take charge of communicating with federal agencies, which was a longstanding FEMA recommendation.
Reached for comment about the failure, William Ray, the person Cooper appointed as the state’s emergency management director in 2021, confirmed no individual met the FEMA requirement. Ray said officials “decided to take a different approach.”
The Post story cited an expert who pointed out deficiencies in the state’s response:
Natalie Simpson, an emergency management expert with the University at Buffalo, said she was shocked the state did not appoint a disaster response czar and said this could help explain the uneven response.
“If there were genuine problems with FEMA’s response, like not penetrating fast enough into the affected areas, somebody that the state appointed as czar would have been sounding the alarm earlier,” she said.
“If FEMA was guilty of anything, the state of North Carolina is equally guilty of it,” Simpson added.
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